It’s Wednesday, I’m In love
Images also shot by Josh Sabini.
When you find out Wednesday are from North Carolina, it makes complete sense.
Their music represents the gritty, odd, and derelict nature of America’s Bible Belt. Telling the stories of their life as twenty-something-year-olds who grew up away from the nation’s urban utopias.
The music they make is simply them. It’s the music that you’d expect from a band from North Carolina who each grew up listening to dream pop, shoegaze and of course country, but to pigeonhole their music in any one genre would be a complete disservice.
Nearly every review online of the band and their music is betting for them to be one of the greatest indie bands of this generation. For them being the greatest I don’t know, I’ll let you be the judge of that, but after listening to any of their discography I’m sure you’ll be able to tell that there is something special there.
I caught up with four of the members of the incredible five-piece on the rooftop of their Melbourne hotel the day before their show in the city for a fun, quick, little chat.
Guys, this place is so awesome! We’re up here at your hotel on the rooftop, next to the pool and hot tub, how does it feel living the rockstar life? Touring Australia staying in this nice hotel, living it up?
Xandy: It feels really good. The beds are comfy. The hot tub is warm and pleasant. It feels pretty good getting off a plane to come here.
Karly: Yeah, we have like four days here which is really cool.
Alan: Yeah, usually we don’t get to spend very long in the places we go to.
Karly: We were in a hotel room in Sydney the other night that was full of mould and dust. I had a cough on stage which was awful.
Stereogum is predicting that you guys might end up as the greatest indie band of your generation. How does it feel having that much pressure on you?
Jake: When did they say that?
Alan: They’ve said it like eight times [laughs].
Karly: That’s the kind of thing that if you internalise it, you’re fucked. So, I’ll take it and then keep doing what we’re doing. I don’t feel any pressure from it.
Alan: It makes me happy that someone feels that way.
Xandy: I think it’s kind of a hilarious statement but I’m also down [laughs].
Karly, you’ve said in the past that your music has been influenced by The Sundays. The Sundays are one of my favourite bands can we talk about the influence they had on your music?
Karly: Do you know when you have an experience when you’re listening to music for the first time and are like ‘Okay, my life is different now’?
Yeah.
Karly: I got a Sundays cassette tape from a random record store in Valdese, North Carolina which is this tiny town, that I just happened to end up in. I got this Sundays record, which I’d never heard, and when I listened to it, I was just like; music is the best part of life. The songs on our first record were a lot more obviously influenced but there is a more subtle influence there now. It is more of an appreciation than it is an influence in the music now because one my voice will never be hers [Harriet Wheeler] and two we are not really making dream pop. It is important to the upbringing of the music taste but not as much of an influence necessarily.
Xandy: I think most of us can agree that The Sundays make perfect music.
Karly: That album is flawless.
Jake: Reading, Writing and Arithmetic?
Karly: Yeah.
Jake: Perfect album.
Being a kid in the South did it feel like you had opened the portal into a new world when you first heard the album?
Karly: I’d been listening to international bands before that, I listened to The Sundays in college. I had a friend who introduced me to a lot of international music, even from India and Africa, in high school because he was just really plugged in. Music did help me feel more connected to the bigger world, as soon as I started getting into stuff that wasn’t from where I was from.
Do you think growing up in the South with the musical influences you’ve all had, it would’ve been a missed opportunity to not combine your influences with what was around you to create this shoegaze-y, indie, country sound when you were making your own music?
Xandy: We don’t really see it as an opportunity to combine those influences that is just what we started making, I guess.
Karly: Yeah agreed, that’s why people like it ultimately. I hate the word “authentic”, but it’s true to who we are and what we like.
Alan: It was all very natural. Making something that sounded different would’ve been a lot of work.
The country music community are known to be aggressively rigid with what can be defined as country music and who can make country music. Have you received much backlash by being labelled as country?
Karly: No because we aren’t really getting played on country radio. I think that’s where that thing is, people are mad about Beyonce making a country album because it’s being played on country radio. We aren’t popular enough to be on country radio. Actually, the local country radio started putting the Gary Stewart song into the rotation after we did our cover, I’m not sure if that is because they became re-aware of the song, but that’s what our manager says.
Xandy: I’m sure there are some hardliners, some old people out there who are like ‘Country music is one thing, I’ll tell you’, but I think now the lines are completely erased. When you listen to 99.9 which is Kiss Country, the definitive country station, half of what they play, to me is indistinguishable from mainstream pop music.
Jake: Country music has always been really different wherever it’s being made, for example, what’s coming out of Nashville is different to what’s coming out of Texas. Whoever is being a snob about it should go listen to what they like.
Alan: If I had to say I’ve seen one genre’s nerd arguing about us online, it is the shoegaze fans.
Should we talk about what the shoegaze fans have been saying?
Karly: No [laughs], I don’t really care, I don’t think it is a conversation that is very productive.
Xandy: I think that is with every genre conversation.
Jake: We’ve all listened to Loveless; we all love it.
Xandy: Yeah, perfect music. Cocteau Twins, perfect music. Swirlies, perfect. It’s all been done just absolutely perfectly.
Jake: We also like The Truckers.
Alan: It’s just useful trying to tell people what you like but then when people start fighting about it, it’s goofy. Sorry for defiling the purity of shoegaze.
Xandy: It’s fun when people are like this music reminds me or has elements of this other artist I like, but once you start putting things in a box it gets a bit much.
How do you feel about being compared to other bands? I’ve always thought it was cheap to compare two bands, being like ‘This band sounds like x, y and z’.
Karly: It depends if people are basing it off the sonics or the visuals because those are two different things. Obviously comparing two female-fronted bands that don’t sound anything alike feels like an insult otherwise I don’t care. I mean people are trying to understand what they like and why they like something.
Xandy: There is a really rude way to do that though. Like saying this band is ripping off this other band.
Alan: This band sounds like dog shit mixed with the Swirlies.
What’s the strangest comparison you’ve always got?
Karly: Alan’s uncle kept calling me Alanis [Morrisette] when we went to the bar.
Alan: I think that is a bit that him and his friends do. They call me Thomas Dolby because I have glasses.
Karly: I think it was kind of sweet, I don’t think he meant it in a bad way, he meant it as a compliment.
Jake: My friend was showing his dad our music and after every single song he played his dad was like ‘Sounds like the Eagles’. I also was describing our band to a guy I met fishing once; I was saying how it is a loud guitar band with a girl singer he was like ‘Oh, kinda like Evanescence’.
Karly: Hell yeah, I love that [laughs]. When we were in Alabama somewhere and y’all were trying to explain the music and he just went ‘Dude, Shine Down fucking rocks’.
Alan: Shine Down is badass.
Karly: Have you ever listened to Shine Down?
No, who are Shine Down?
Alan: It’s a butt rock band.
Xandy: It’s badass man.
Jake: It’s bad and it’s ass.
Alan: We could get asked to tour with Shine Down and you’re blowing it for us.
Damn, Jake, you could blow it for all of you guys. The little vlogs on your YouTube channel are really cute. Who came up with the idea to make them?
Karly: Yeah, I’ve been doing those since high school. It’s just a way to track my life that isn’t necessarily motivated by any social capital, it is on social media, but it is more purely for me. It’s just a way to keep memories.
Alan: You can tell by the editing style.
Karly: Shut the fuck up [laughs].
Xandy: What’s your beef?
Alan: I like it a lot but my parents when they watch one are always like ‘Why is it so fast?’
I think they are really sweet. I was going through them; it is such a nice way to capture a month.
Karly: Aw thanks.
Xandy: It’s always weird to me that those are public, it’s also really cool. I watch it and I’m like this is for us. I get more and more people coming up to me after shows and being like ‘I watch your videos’.
In the January one, there is a snippet of Iggy Pop introducing you guys on his radio show. What was that like having Iggy Pop introduce you like that?
Karly: [Laughs] I love that clip. Obviously, it’s so cool, it’s Iggy Pop. I am so glad I have the clip.
Jake: I remember waking up to my phone buzzing and it was 7am, I looked at and listened to it and then went back to sleep. Then I was dreaming of Iggy Pop talking about us, I woke up again and I was like holy shit that was real.
Xandy: It is so cool to be able to interact with that generation of musicians, it kind of breaks my brain.
You guys have been putting out an album a year for the past four years. This year you’ve been travelling since the middle of January. Do you have another album planned for this year?
Karly: We record in April, but it isn’t coming out this year.
Xandy: Damn, we are breaking our streak, I never thought about that. We should drop it this year.
Karly: I need a break from the PR cycle.
What you mean, we’re doing an interview right now [laughs]?
Karly: Well, this is different, this isn’t for the album specifically. When you’re putting out an album the interviews are just about the album, and you get asked the same questions every time. Interviews when you are touring are just hanging out and different.
Xandy: You don’t have to do a PR cycle.
Karly: Yeah, I might not. I didn’t for the cover album, I guess.
I want to ask about one song on the cover album, you covered Perfect by The Smashing Pumpkins. It’s quite a different song to the rest of the songs that you covered on the album, why did you cover that song?
Karly: That was the first cover that we ever recorded together, when Jake and I first started dating.
Jake: We did that in 2018 in my bedroom. That is one of my favourite Smashing Pumpkins songs and their version is super poppy, I like their poppy songs. Karly and I were recording an EP together, the idea was to make it shoegaze with no drums just loud guitars and vocals. Those cords are pretty simple so I thought it would work out well. I came across it on the Pumpkins subreddit one day and the Pumpkins fans on the Reddit do not like it but they also like the new Pumpkins records. So, yeah that’s on them.
Xandy: It’s a skill issue for sure [laughs].
Okay so finally last.fm recorded that there are five bands called Wednesday, there is you, then the Canadian band active during the 60s/70s known for "Last Kiss”, the German-English rock band active from 1975-1980, the Swedish entry in the 2003 Junior Eurovision competition, and an instrumental rock band from Bangkok. Who do you think would win in a fight?
Jake: Probably Wednesday 13, with the scary guy.
Alan: Yeah, he wasn’t on the list, but he would show up.
Karly: With a knife.
Jake: That guy is scary you wouldn’t want to run into him at night.
Xandy: The instrumental band from Bangkok could be brutal, I have to listen to their music to make a call. But we have pretty high stats between the five of us.
Karly: Not me.
Alan: We’ll see.
Jake: Xandy would do all the heavy lifting, he’s the scrappiest.
Xandy: Alan too. We would go back-to-back and do the thing where we would get back-to-back, link arms and do crazy shit.
Alan: I’m a tank.
Jake: Can we bring our tour van?
Oh, the tour van counts for sure.
Xandy: We just got a new van back home.
Alan: I don’t know if any of those guys are in a bus yet, so we might have them all there.